This disclosure relates generally to the field of computing. More particularly, but not by way of limitation, this disclosure relates to a technique for providing continuous content sharing through intelligent resolution of federated hierarchical graphs.
In most enterprise products, the instances of a product may be distributed across geographically diverse locations. There is a need to manage and share content utilized in many instances of a product. There are a number of different approaches to content sharing between these instances; however, each introduces its own set of problems.
One approach is to logically connect product instances at the database layer through data replication and distributed locking, with the goal of keeping content identical across all instances of the product, as illustrated in FIG. 1. Although possible, this solution, particularly over geographically dispersed locations, is fragile due to the latency and unreliable nature of wide area network links. In today's geographically dispersed IT organizations, the data synchronization among different instances is usually impractical or impossible. Use-cases such as the incorporation of new domains through company acquisition also make this practice difficult. In a large distributed system, “emergency” changes to local domains are also unavoidable in the day-to-day running of those systems.
Another very common approach is to export content from one domain (product instance), and import it directly into another domain. Although the import/export solution works in simple scenarios, there are scenarios in which the content conflicts cause serious stumbling blocks for customers. The numbers of ways content can conflict are enormous, and how they are resolved can be daunting. Either content has to be merged, or, in a worst-case scenario, the content may have to be imported into the target system as a completely separate set of objects.
There is a need, therefore, for a simple, elegant mechanism to address the problem of content sharing between domains.